Inside the animatronic 'War Horse' used in grisly trench scenes

Most of the scenes in Steven Spielberg's World War I epic
War Horse use real horses, but a couple of particularly
animal-unfriendly scenes required the use of animatronics.
Wired.co.uk discovers how special effects company Neil Corbould SFX,
which has created mind-blowing effects for movies such as
Gladiator, The Day After Tomorrow, The Fifth
Element and Saving Private Ryan, created its
startlingly-realistic steed.

Adrian Parish, one of the mechanics that worked on a team of
more than a dozen sculptors, puppeteers and engineers to bring the
horse to life, explained: "Our brief was to provide a realistic
horse that could sit in mud and barbed wire for an extended period
of time, something that would not be safe or possible with a live
animal."

One scene featuring the animatronic horse was where equine
protagonist Joey gets caught in barbed wire in no-mans land between
the German and British trenches.The horse was placed on a very busy, wet and muddy set in a disused
airfield in Surrey designed to look like the battlefield of Somme
during WWI.

The team decided it was best to build to build a puppet that
could be manipulated from beneath using control rods. As the
mechanism was to be bured underneath the creature, they decided to
avoid complex hydraulics and keep it simple so that there were
fewer opportunities for technical failure.

Underneath the horse puppet was a box in which four puppeteers
could sit and manipulate the creature's body and head, creating
movements including breathing. "A household kettle was also
installed in the box that had tubes running between it and the
nostrils to give the illusion of condensed breath," Parish
added.

The head part of the puppet was radio-controlled and contained 25
servo motors to control the eyes, eyelids, ears, brows, lips,
nostrils and jaw. The head alone took three puppeteers to control
-- one to operate the eyes, one for the mouth and one for the
ears. This team didn't have to cram into the buried box, but were
above ground, able to observe their handiwork.

The skin was created using a full size clay sculpture of the horse.
A moulded fibreglass shell was covered in a centimetre-thick layer
of clay, which was then covered in another layer of fibreglass.
Once all the layers had set, the clay was removed from between the
two fibreglass layers and replaced with an injection of foam latex.
The skin's fine seams had to be very carefully removed before
painting and the whole thing was fitted over an articulated
fibreglass skeleton.

The final stage was to flock
the horse to give it its shiny fur. This process involved applying
a layer of polyuerthane glue, onto which small artificial hairs
were applied. An airbrush was then used to blow the hair into the
desired direction before the glue set. The final touches came with
the addition of fine hairs around the mouth, ears and brows that
were set individually. Then the eyelashes were applied and the
whole thing was airbrushed once again.

Once the puppet body and animatronic head were complete, they were
set in position and dressed with barbed wire and fake blood and
scars. The animatronic horse is as impressive as the puppets used
in the stage production of War Horse, seen in a Ted talk here.

Watch the staggeringly realistic head (before the addition of
fur) and body in action in the videos embedded in this
post.